(The Epoch Times)—Two Ohio state lawmakers have introduced a bill that would make it easier for people to buy raw milk, describing it as a “matter of liberty.”
Earlier this month, state Reps. Kellie Deeter and Levi Dean, both Republicans, introduced House Bill 406, which would allow farmers to sell raw milk directly to customers. The proposed legislation would not permit retail sales or deliveries.
“We’ve legalized marijuana, but we have restrictions for getting raw milk. That needs to change, and that is the purpose of this bill,” Deeter told The Epoch Times.
Ohioans should be “free to choose whether they want to drink raw milk or not,” Dean told The Epoch Times.
“We live in a state where you can choose to drink alcohol, you can choose to use tobacco, you can choose to use marijuana, and all of those are perfectly legal, but yet, raw milk is too dangerous for us, apparently,” Dean said.
“It makes no sense that the government would say all of these things are fine, but raw milk is a step too far.”
The Food and Drug Administration defines raw milk as “milk from cows, sheep, or goats that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria.”
Pasteurization involves heating a liquid product to kill bacteria, including Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria.
The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that drinking raw milk is risky.
Selling raw milk is illegal in Ohio unless the user signs a herd share agreement, which involves buying a share of a cow or a herd for their boarding and management. Consumers can also buy the product from farms and stores that label it as “pet milk” and not for human consumption.
The proposed bill would require customers to sign a liability waiver stating that they understand the risks of drinking unpasteurized milk. Sellers would be required to test once a month for harmful bacteria that can be found in raw milk and discard batches that test positive.
Raw milk sellers would get a license through the state’s Director of Agriculture. Dairy farmers in Ohio must already follow this regulation, which includes inspections of their facilities.
The consumption of raw milk is growing in the United States. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he drinks raw milk daily.
The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, which encourages people to eat locally produced food and avoid ultra-processed food, has contributed to the popularity of raw milk consumption.
Legislator Voices Objections
Ohio state Rep. Anita Somani, a Democrat who’s an OB-GYN, told a Columbus TV station that the bill would take Ohio “backwards” in public health.
“Ingesting raw milk and those types of bacteria, it may not impact someone who is healthy,” Somani said. “At minimum, they may end up with diarrhea, or nausea, or vomiting. For somebody who’s immunocompromised, somebody who’s pregnant, it can be devastating.”
States have a wide range of raw milk regulations. Some allow retail purchases in stores, and others permit sales only at farms or through herd shares.
In North Dakota, for example, a law took effect on Aug. 1 that legalized direct-to-consumer sales of raw milk products. Producers can now sell raw milk to consumers for personal use, but it can’t be sold to wholesalers or retail stores, and it can’t be donated.
Legalizing raw milk would allow the state to ensure the product is safer since residents are already drinking it through herd share agreements and containers labeled as “pet milk,” Deeter said.
“The more I looked into the issue of raw milk, it became more apparent to me that we should just legalize and appropriately regulate it because it is nonsense the way it is done now,” Deeter said.
Stephanie Stock, executive director of Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, told The Epoch Times that her organization “has always supported an individual’s right to make health and food choices they feel are in their best interest.”
“This includes the right of Ohioans to choose to drink raw milk as a more natural alternative to processed dairy,” she said.
Stock noted that the testing and licensure requirements make the proposed bill more likely to pass.
Michael Kilpatrick and his wife, Savannah Kilpatrick, own Farm on Central, an urban farm in southwest Ohio that operates as a private, farmer-to-consumer membership organization.
When “produced responsibly,” Michael Kilpatrick said, raw milk offers significant benefits that outweigh the risks for many people, especially compared with the industrialized pasteurized milk system we have today.
“Direct farmer-to-consumer sales empowers informed choices while cutting out the middlemen who historically caused the problems,” Kilpatrick said in support of HB 406.
“Ohioans deserve access to this nutrient-dense food. Let’s support policies that prioritize real food over outdated fears.”
The bill awaits a committee assignment and a hearing. The Ohio Legislature returns in September.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
